Vivencias

The first question everyone asked me when they learned I planned to go to Haiti was, “Who are you going with?” When I told them I was going alone, a look of horror crossed their faces, followed by admonitions to be careful and lists of things I should not do, which included just about everything. Their fears were not even slightly allayed by the fact that I was meeting someone over there and joining a university trip.

I had been studying Kreyol a bit in preparation for my trip, which one of my friends told me was “not even a language.” Another expatriate told me she saw no reason for visiting such a dirty, third world country. I am not saying that I didn’t have some trepidation about crossing the border into a place with serious travel warnings posted and UN Peacekeepers patrolling in white jeeps, but something else seemed to be operating here beyond these rational fears.

There is the physical presence of Haiti, which occupies the western third of our island, but there is also another Haiti which is more powerful in our imagination. Haiti represents everything dark and strange, our night terrors. Dominican parents have been known to tell their children that if they aren’t careful, Haitians will carry them off in the night. They joke about not being able to see them in the dark. It is this latter darker Haiti of our imaginations which is evoked when I told people I was going to Haiti.

On the way out of Santo Domingo, our bus followed a small guagua with the following message written on its back window: “El que tiene dinero piensa que él que no lo tiene no vale nada.” (Those who have money think that those who don’t are worth nothing.) It seemed an eerily appropriate message that only grew in meaning over the course of the trip.

I was actually more terrified by the political border than by Haiti itself. I didn’t like leaving my children on one side of it and crossing to the other. The border is a dusty, desolate outpost with a huge wall and gate on the Dominican side. The bus company takes all of our passports when we board the bus. They pay the taxes that we have paid in advance (in dollars, oddly) to the appropriate officials. They handed back the Haitian passports first and then the Dominican and the few of us who were neither waited while our passports were checked in a special room. Once we had been checked through the Dominican side, we were let out of the gate into a no man’s border land where a market thrives. People trade goods in little market stalls and money changers approach us asking if we want to trade pesos for gourds.

Once we entered the Haitian immigration station, no one spoke Spanish anymore and my Kreyol was not good enough to allow me to understand much, but I was checked through. I had crossed the border at Jimani and rode along the shore of a salt water lake called Etang Saumatre. The dirt road bordered a cliff and frequently the lake water washed over it.

At first the differences aren’t so apparent. The land seems drier, and the houses less finished in their construction. At first you don’t notice the lack of infrastructure, or the abandoned nature of the place. That comes later.